No one would blame you for looking at ITCH and filing it under zombie film. Because it is. The outbreak spreads person to person. People stop being people. The world ends a little bit. You know how it goes.
What Bari Kang actually made is something with a different mechanism at its center. The contagion does not spread through biting. It spreads through scratching. You scratch yourself. This makes you sick while it is happening. You scratch because someone near you scratched and something in your brain said that looks right.
I talked to Kang about it. Turns out it was not a deliberate subversion. “It was never meant to be a zombie film,” he told me. “That happened along the way.” The idea came during COVID. He watched someone scratching in a store and could not stop thinking about it. “What if that’s how something spreads?” He started writing from there and somewhere in the process the zombies arrived. “All of a sudden I had these zombies running around.” He went that route without going that route.
Why the Scratch Works
We all get how zombies work. They bite, someone hides their bite, sometime later everyone is dead. Kang’s instinct was that the scratch would do something different. “It’s really visceral and contagious,” he said. “I figured if I could lean into that, that might work well.” He was right.
There is something about watching someone scratch that is harder to look away from than watching someone get bitten. You feel it on your own skin. The sympathy itch is real and ITCH knows it and uses it without being cute about it. That is craft. For a film Kang wrote, directed, produced, and starred in himself, that is not a small thing.
Who Is Bari Kang
The short version: he decided he wanted to be an actor, spent a year auditioning and booking nothing, and then casting director Judy Henderson, who was in the middle of casting Homeland at the time, told him to go write his own stuff. “I was like, oh, you can do that,” he told me.
He said: “Nobody’s coming to give you a hand. There’s no handouts. It seems like we need permission or something to do it, but you just gotta get out there.” Yeah. That.
The Rule About Lore
There were versions of ITCH that explained what the itch was, where it came from, who started it. Kang cut all of it. The less he showed, the more the film asked audiences to do the work themselves. And audiences who do the work are more scared than audiences who are shown everything.
ITCH does not explain itself and it does not need to. A film about a contagion that spreads through something you cannot stop yourself from doing, made in the aftermath of a pandemic everyone lived through, does not require a mythology breakdown. It requires you to sit with what it is suggesting. Which is worse.
ITCH is available now.